SEO World

The Personal Brand Strategy: If you are looking to have yourself and your name branded as an expert or authority in any niche, social media can help you find people who need your expertise, and explore your products or services. In addition to a main site or blog, managing your personal brand on social media should focus on these cornerstones:

• Be Yourself - Honesty goes a long way in on the social web. A person who takes the time to genuinely engage other users gives the appearance of being easily accessible, which naturally leads to being discovered by other users. Additionally,  not all your content has to do with your product or business. By posting about news stories, personal experiences, or general observations about your day, you avoid the risk of being pigeonholed as a one-topic user.
• Stay Consistent – The time you dedicate to your presence on the social web is always well spent if it leads to new opportunities. Don’t focus on imaginary benchmarks that “experts” claim will bring you success (i.e. following 50 people per day, posting 3 links per day). Consider how someone who discovers your profile for the first time, and the impression that they will get about working with you.
• Approach Each Tool Separately – All social networks have basic ground rules, and some level of integration. Saving time is important, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of your reputation. Don’t over-automate your content – otherwise readers see hashtags on facebook (which do nothing), or tweets with cut off text (with a link back to facebook that will be ignored).

The Professional Brand Strategy: Many businesses have a presence on social media, but the successful ones are using these general guidelines.

• Find Your Customers – Depending on the target audience for your product or service, you may find that a specific social network has a more active community of users for your efforts. If you work with professionals or people with specific credentials, Linkedin is ideal for your goals. This is just one example, but finding a primary source for your relationships to develop is ideal.
• Research Everything – The amount of data that can be collected from the social web is worth billions, and the barrier to entry for analyzing it is incredibly low. Using pre-programmed plugins and customizable reports from tools like Hootsuite and Google Analytics gives your instant insights as to how people are interacting with your content on the social web. Use this data to develop better marketing strategies, or even develop new products.
• Integrate Social Sharing Logically – Many brands think that just being on the social web is enough. For some, it is, but the real power comes from having your customers share their experience with your brand to THEIR social network. If you have a sign up form, or commenting on your site, integrate with Facebook Connect for users to share their activity automatically. If people are buying from your site, add an option for a post about the purchase to be automatically tweeted or added to their timeline.

The Corporate Brand Strategy: Big brands have been slow to adopt social media, often playing “follow the leader” to rivals, or finding themselves forced to jump in to resolve bad PR. Large organizations have the resources to dedicate to campaigns of a larger scale, and can see success with the following points:

• Divide and Conquer – For companies that sell many different products, it makes perfect sense to create different social hubs for different target audiences. Amazon is a perfect example of this strategy, as they have multiple twitter feeds for updates on books, music, movies, and other specialized topics. Additionally, a specific account for customer service will allow for more direct communication with customers in need.
• Develop Policy – For brands with different levels of management and a top down decision making culture, before you even create an account, you need to have a clear chain of internal communication as to what your responses will be, who is authorized to post and where to direct opportunities for business development.  In social media flexibility and speed are expected – on the social web, you’re judged by how fast a question is answered.
• Empower Employees – This aspect ties in to the social media policy point, but by encouraging your staff to share their experiences with the company, and acting as a contact point for the public to approach them with questions is a powerful way to be recognized as an innovator. The most well-known example of a company with an open social media platform for employees is Zappos, the shoe retailer who was purchased by Amazon for $ 1 billion in 2009.

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Social Media Optimization

From the day it became popular, Twitter has been a magnet for spammers – users who only create accounts to trick legitimate users into buying products, downloading software, or spreading unwanted material. Twitter has always been proactive in combating spammers, but with the ease of use to create an account, massive userbase, and open source architecture, the spammers have always been one step ahead.

This week, Twitter announced on their official blog that they have filed a lawsuit against software providers who’s programs are used to aggressively abuse the service’s features through automation.  Software providers named in the suit include TweetAttacks, TweetAdder, and TweetBuddy.

These tools work in a variety of ways. They allow for the creation of multiple accounts with minor variations, which are designed to appeal to people interested in different topics. They also allow for a list of users to be created and auto-followed in bulk, and to be unfollowed after a certain time frame. These programs also monitor specific tweets to be sent to users who mention specific keywords, usually with no context in the hope of picking up traffic to the linked site.

All of the tools are reliant on Twitter’s API, and skirt the user terms of service. Users must pay for a license to activate the software on their computers. Twitter seems more interested in shutting down the tools and sending a message to would-be spam tool providers, but will be seeking damages as well.

Earlier in the year, Twitter acquired the security firm Dasient to lead the charge in their efforts to reduce malicious links that are shared on the service. Twitter’s built in link-shortening service (t.co) automatically scans links to ensure the caliber of the site linked to, and to flag suspicious links and the accounts that sent them.

With a service like Twitter where there are countless opportunities for interaction, it’s natural for users to report something they don’t like or didn’t ask for as “spam” even if it was not. In order to avoid being labeled as a spammer, you should NEVER do any of the following:

Massive Adding/Deleting of Followers – This strategy of following others with the hope that they will follow you back is one of the biggest myths of success with Twitter. The number of followers you have is not a reputable measurement, and it never was. Smart marketers know that the real metric of importance is engagement.

Keyword spamming – This strategy involves sending an automatic reply to anyone who is posting a specific keyword or phrase. To the average user, there is nothing more annoying than posting a tweet about anything (i.e., iPad, news story, celebrity, sports team), and then getting an avalanche of responses trying to get you to click on a link to “learn more about (whatever you posted).” This is especially annoying to newer users who are looking for true conversation, and can be turned off from using Twitter from it.

Link Stuffing – If your Twitter stream is nothing but links back to your main site (or worse, an affiliate product that you are using pre-written content for), no one is going to follow you. Make your tweets worth reading and go beyond the bare minimum.

Of course, the most successful Twitter users are active, involved with their followers, and engage them daily. When used ethically, the following automated strategies can help marketers be successful on Twitter.

Scheduled posts – Pre-scheduling content to promote an upcoming event, promotion, or sale is a powerful way to constantly have your followers notified of what you are offering. Be sure to change the language and writing of the tweets to maximize effectiveness. Scheduling is a standard feature in Hootsuite – my social dashboard of choice.

Other Service Integration – Set up your Twitter stream to automatically post when you make certain actions, such as posting on Facebook, uploading a video to your Youtube Channel, or publishing a new blog post. Also be sure to monitor your Twitter account regularly to review the services you have authorized to post on your behalf, and disable any that you don’t want to have permissions.

Welcome messages to new users – Again, this is a strategy that can do more harm than good if abused. Use a tool like SocialOomph and create a message that is sent privately to new followers. Make sure the message is genuine and include a link to have people contact you or learn more. Don’t pitch special deals or offers, but sell yourself and how people can work with you going forward.

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Social Media Optimization

Everyone wants to do SEO for their websites for a better indexation by Google, no matter the language used, Spanish SEO, English SEO, etc.
Now, Google thinks as everyone is doing a lot to get easier and faster on the first pages on Google, they warn us about over optimization.
Firstly the Titles we use need to be authentic , using keywords, but to look as natural as possible.
Secondly the links used in articles, that link to other web pages need to be legit. If it is useful, use it, if not better leave it out, because the results will not come.
The anchor text should not be put at the bottom of the page but on the main menu. Keep it simple and accurate.
Some websites have some real bad text content blocks after the good one, abusing the keywords, of course written exclusively for the search engine. Get rid of it! It will only invite the search engine to penalize you!
Regarding back linking, we should be careful about: link networks, comment spam, automated software, forum signature links, bad reciprocal links, article marketing sites, SEO focused directories.
Finally, large amounts of pages targeting similar keywords or with slight variations are not a good solution for SEO.
A good SEO is always good for the website, the search engines, the readers, the customers and for our business.

En el mundo del marketing online se habla mucho de SEO, del posicionamiento web de las empresas y marcas o blogs, y por supuesto después de los resultados que se ven en la reacción de los usuarios y en el Page Rank.
El Page Rank es la marca registrada de Google desde 1999 y que asigna la relevancia de una web con números de 0 a 10, utilizando algoritmos.
Evidentemente se trata de seguir los enlaces  que apuntan a la web y que otras páginas web enlazan nuestra web.
Más grande sea el Page Rank que enlace nuestra web lo mejor es para todo el mundo, tanto para la visibilidad, para los usuarios que la encuentran más rápido, etc.
Si miramos el algoritmo publicado para medir el Page Rank vemos que se toma en cuenta el valor de cada página web que nos enlaza, el numero de los enlaces, como también una variable y el Page Rank de la pagina web analizada.
Si nuestra web esta enlazada por páginas con un alto Page Rank, nuestra página también tendrá un Page Rank alto.
Todo el mundo quiere tener un Page Rank de 10 o lo más alto posible, pero esto se consigue a lo largo del tiempo y con mucho esfuerzo.
Google está luchando contra el Spam todo el tiempo, porque no es correcto obtener enlaces a través de este método.

Hoy en dia la mayoría de nosotros sabemos que es SEO y porque es necesario optimizar el sitio web de tu negocio: incrementar el numero de los visitantes y los potenciales clientes.
El posicionamiento web es importante no solamente para las compañias que viven de las ganancias hechas a través de las tiendas virtuales, pero también para cualquier empresa que requiere tener visibilidad al nivel local, nacional y global.
Los consultores de marketing online pueden ayudarte tanto con SEO, como también con las técnicas de SEM y tu reputación online, especialmente en las redes sociales como Twitter, Facebook, etc, que son muy importantes para la visibilidad online.
Cual es la mejor solución: hacer tu mismo SEO, contratar an alguien desconocido, pero que sabe bien las herramientas o una empresa especializada en SEO. La calidad y la garantía de unos buenos servicios solamente lo puede hacer una empresa que ya tiene experiencia en el mercado y los expertos hacen su trabajo con herramientas de pago.
Los procedimientos de optimizar un sitio web son varios y hay que utilizarlos todos: destacar en los redes sociales para obtener mas visitantes, crear títulos y descripciones adecuadas para cada pagina de tu web, tener una mapa del sitio web en tu pagina, verificar el tiempo de carga de la web, alojar tu sitio web en un servidor fiable.
Los servicios de SEO no son muy bajos, por eso algunas empresas prefieren que le hagan la optimización alguien quien no esta especializado en SEO, porque cobrara menos y además muchos creen que si se garantiza una posición buena en la primera pagina de los buscadores en pocas semanas, debe de ser cierto.
No todos saben que hay que trabajar duro cada semana para el sitio web.
Las herramientas de pago son fiables, puedes ver los resultados. El cliente que tiene un sitio web muchas veces no entiende porque tarda tanto en ver algún resultado del posicionamiento. Los mas rapidos métodos, el spam que algunos utilizan para hacer el black SEO esta penalizado por Google.
A lo largo del tiempo estas técnicas de posicionamiento web han cambiando un poco y otras tecnologías han aparecido como las de las búsquedas universales, personalizadas, sociales, locales o en tiempo real.

La mayoría de las empresas tiene un sitio web en lo cual van promoviendo los productos o los servicios que venden a través del internet y también en tiendas físicas.
Los empresarios piensan siempre en soluciones para que el negocio crezca lo mas pronto posible, lo que culmino con la aparición hace algún tiempo del marketing online, todo por desarrollar la compañía. Asi entendieron de que trata SEO, que es la optimización del sitio web con el propósito de situarse bien con los motores de búsqueda que la gente utiliza.
Mas y mas utilizadores hacen sus compras online, por lo tanto es imprescindible llegar a las primeras posiciones en los buscadores, como Google y Yahoo, que son lo mas utilizados. Los procedimientos de hacer un buen posicionamiento web son diversos. El mejor buscador del mundo, Google viene con la solución de unas
La mayoría de los programas necesarios para optimizar un sitio web son de pago y siempre es mejor encargar an empresas especializadas en SEO de ocuparse de nuestro negocio porque garantizan una buena optimización y nosotros podemos concentrarnos en nuestra empresa.
Los clientes a la hora de buscar algo en Google por ejemplo, casi nunca miran mas de tres paginas. Es importante tener una buena posición en la web para garantizar por lo menos que la gente la encuentre rápidamente y asi obtener popularidad. Muchos hace las compras pensando en las marcas que conocen que por la calidad de los productos o servicios.
Las redes sociales ayudan mucho a la hora de llegar a los consumidores comodamente y muy rápido.
Tener visibilidad en la web ha llegado ser vital para muchas empresas que tienen una actividad que requiere estar conectado al internet todo el tiempo.

Good interview with Melissa Sowry, Content and Social Media Manager for Burt’s Bees recently on eMarketer, in which Melissa spoke about how Burt’s Bees uses social media to create buzz about its products, especially Facebook. Burt’s Bees have been able to grow their Facebook fan base from 98,000 to more than 370,000.

Here are some excerpts from that interview:

eMarketer: What drives online word-of-mouth for your brand?

Sowry: Beauty is a category where people take recommendations from their friends and talk about what’s new. They also look to experts for suggestions. For example, if we get a placement in Marie Claire or Lucky where they’re raving about the new tinted lip balm, we might share the link to the page.

We also find fans of the brand are recommending products to one another in this space. That’s the normal activity that takes place around beauty products. It’s mostly women talking to other women and finding out what works, but it’s taking place online in social media venues. For example, a mother might ask other moms about products that stop diaper rash: “What works for you?” These are important conversations and I think online social media is a place where people trust one another to get that information.

eMarketer: What is the brand’s approach to Facebook?

Sowry: Facebook is a channel for us to provide compelling content. When I came on board, we started doing simple things—posting content and behind-the-scenes images on a daily basis and discussing new products coming to market.

We use social media and Facebook in particular as relationship-building tools. We also create opportunities for consumer education around skin care, for example, and sampling offers. We ran successful sampling programs on Facebook for our relaunched body lotions and new tinted lip balm.

We talk about our products on Facebook but we also spend time talking about the culture at Burt’s Bees through our involvement with Habitat for Humanity, sustainability efforts, product ingredients and so forth.

eMarketer: How do you track the ROI from your social media activity and how do sampling efforts impact sales down the line?

Sowry: We monitor the traffic we have going from Facebook to Burtsbees.com. We’re constantly looking at ways that we can monitor traffic, fan growth and sentiment about the brand.

We’d like to be able to say that because we launched a Facebook sampling tab we’ve increased our fan count and increased sales by a certain percentage, but we’re not in that place yet to have those sorts of metrics. But we do know that we’re driving more traffic to our ecommerce site due to the activity on Facebook.

eMarketer: Burt’s Bees has a “Shop & Share” feature on Facebook where brand fans can ask their friends about a purchase. How successful has it been?

Sowry: That tab was designed as a first generation of us looking at shopping on Facebook. You can’t complete a transaction with the Shop & Share tab—the technology is not at that stage yet. When you click on a product, we can import a product feed. We could have all of our products up there if we want, but can only display 10 products per page. If you click on the “Shop” button on the tab, you go to Burtsbees.com, our ecommerce site, to complete the transaction and the order.

Shop & Share was sort of a test to see if it’s something that we should invest in. We’ll be looking at it in the next fiscal year since more brands are starting to offer the ability to complete transactions within Facebook. People want to stay within the Facebook environment.

eMarketer: What kind of content gets the most traction on your Facebook page?

Sowry: Everything from video, product recommendations, news about new products, ingredients, guidance in selecting the right products.

One thing that really engages people are questions. For example, we asked people on a Friday what they’re thankful for. We said we were thankful for honey. We did one around lip care: “What makes your lips like nobody else’s?” We had 106 comments on that post in a day.

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Social Media Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is a buzzword in most circles on the Internet yet few really understand what it is and how it works. Given this lack of understanding, most businesses, blogs, and individuals don’t get that it’s, for all intents and purposes, the life blood of ensuring online success. Most consider SEO with the same indifference or soft approach that has allowed competition to railroad them while, concurrently, making huge success stories from other online entrepreneurs.

Knowing the Difference
Companies, on average, spend far more on their advertising that they actually need to. Without guaranteed results, businesses will pour tons of money into approaches that they hope will work while basically ignoring the power of the search ranking. You can have the greatest ad campaign but if you’re not high on the list in a search, you might as well have not even tried. This will, in essence, make all of your work, planning, and advertising expenses virtually pointless. SEO is just one tool but it’s one of the most important and there are essentially just two types of SEO but both are not equal.

On-Page Optimization
This is when an individual or business directly relates to the content and structure of their own web site. Whether it’s hyperlinks on the web site or in documents or content. It’s, basically, when someone directly links back to themselves on the same site. It’s also considered the most ineffectual way to promote oneself. Many search engines widely discount the weight of this approach given the ease with which it can be abused. Some have considered this a stopgap measure but there are better approaches.

Off-Site Optimization
This is considered the best approach and can best be described when you create content, articles, or otherwise and place them on other web sites that will then link back to your web site. This usually increases your profile and search ranking in a big way. It’s widely viewed as the most influential potion of SEO but it’s not just about backlink (posicionamiento web)s. If your content is filled with spam and junk content, you’re just shooting yourself in the foot and throwing good money after bad. Many entrepreneurs and web sites have created an entire industry around providing these quality services that are, for the time being, driving the world of online marketing (marketing online) and profiles.

Neil Patel

Neil Patel is one such online mover and shaker that currently runs a site that’s devoted to giving people the best online poker strategy. Some of his past projects, with sites like KISSmetrics, have helped ensure the online success of companies like AOL, General Motors, and Viacom. This is an impressive list but it’s not like there’s some revolutionary approach. It’s all the same.

Working with the social media world and applying tools like SEO is simply what works. “So you’ve created a website and got people to come to it. Good job. How many are ordering? How many fill out your form? A 5% difference one way or the other can be worth hundreds of thousands to your bottom line.” This statement simply underscores the way the business works and if you’re swimming with the current, by using quality SEO consulting, then you’re far better off then building a web site and simply hoping/waiting for the business to come to you. That’s not how it works. That’s never how it’s worked.

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Social Media Optimization

Dan Rose, VP of partnerships and platform marketing at Facebook gave an April 6 keynote address at the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit and he touched on a couple of companies who are seeing a measurable increase in revenue by being on Facebook.

Rose said marketers that are seeing results from integrating Facebook social components on their websites include American Eagle Outfitters, Levi’s, OpenTable, ShoeDazzle, Ticketmaster, Travelocity and Benefit Cosmetics.

American Eagle implemented a “like” button on its site and found Facebook users it tracked spent 57% more than non-Facebook customers. Rose said Levi’s implemented “like” buttons on all product pages last year, and more than 50% of its Cyber Monday traffic came from Facebook.

Benefit Cosmetics is allowing customers to add product reviews on their Facebook page. Those reviews flow to the Benefit website through the Bazaarvoice SocialConnect Suite platform. Within two weeks, he said, 80% of Benefit’s products were reviewed and rated on Facebook.

Ticketmaster has a new feature that allows concert ticket buyers to tell friends about the purchase on Facebook. Through tracking, Ticketmaster says that it receives $ 5.30 per link shared on Facebook in revenue. At first glance that it not a big number. But when you realize that there are hundreds of millions of people on Facebook, then that $ 5.30 per link suddenly looks very impressive.

“We now have a direct link between sharing on Facebook and revenue generation at e-commerce sites,” Rose was quoted as saying in the New York Times. “This is word of mouth on steroids,” Rose said, according to Direct Marketing News. “This is how you take advantage of the social Web.”

 

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Social Media Optimization

As Facebook prepares to celebrate hitting 500 million members this week, we’re seeing more news of the controversial film The Social Network.** With the tagline “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies,” the trailer for the film has been running on thesocialnetwork-movie.com or 500millionfriends.com. You can watch it below now:

Sony is advertising the movie on Twitter - but not on Facebook (go figure!). The founders of Facebook have already reacted to the trailer. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is going to be played by Jesse Eisenberg, probably most well known for his part in Adventureland. Pretty good casting, in my opinion.

Now, here comes the fun part.

If they were holding open casting calls for extras and you were going to be featured, what famous person, dead or alive, would play you in the movie? Leave a comment below or reply with a post on your own blog with a link back to this post.

To get you started, here are ten individuals in the social media space and their Hollywood doppelgängers. Fair warning: these aren’t meant to insult anyone – I’m going for humor – and I purposefully didn’t use any women as subjects – I really didn’t want to get into trouble.

Author & NML President Chris Brogan / Jeff Bridges

Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore / Orlando Bloom

Boston media maven C.C. Chapman / Simon Cowell

Video savant Steve Garfield / Dirty Jobs’ Mike Rowe

Prolific author & speaker Seth Godin / Larry David

Ragan Communications CEO Mark Ragan / Bruce Davison

Web strategist & Altimeter Partner Jeremiah Owyang / Wayne Newton

Author & PR expert Brian Solis / Johnny Depp

Powered CMO Aaron Strout / Guy Fieri

WineLibrary.tv‘s Gary Vaynerchuck / Joe Pesci

Me? Oh, I almost forgot. Johnny Carson.

** No, this isn’t the a remake of the 1976 movie Network, famous for the line “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” But the results might be similar…

Bonus content:

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The Social Media Marketing Blog